


in the hour of departure, i raise my song to you

by dejaboo (cosmicbluebells)



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Angst, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Loneliness, M/M, One Shot, Please Don't Hate Me, Sad Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:48:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25523131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmicbluebells/pseuds/dejaboo
Summary: The end of the world is here. The population has been almost entirely wiped out, and Chenle and Jisung are two of the only people left on earth who haven't been caught and subjected to "testing." They've endured on their own for years, but time is running out fast.Alternatively: Jisung is almost gone. When he leaves, Chenle will be all alone. He doesn't know if he even wants to try surviving anymore.
Relationships: Park Jisung/Zhong Chen Le
Comments: 8
Kudos: 28





	in the hour of departure, i raise my song to you

**Author's Note:**

> The title is kind of a twist on a poem I read recently - Pablo Neruda's "A Song of Despair." I apologize for the weird summary, but it's 1am and I really just wanted to get this out as soon as possible. Not edited/beta-read so please excuse any mistakes or errors, I promise I'll come back to edit soon. 
> 
> With that said, please enjoy my angsty word-vomit version of an apocalypse AU!

When Chenle was younger, maybe nine or ten, he had dreamt of being a world-famous singer. Touring the world, filming TV appearances, standing on a stage just like the singers whose albums he treasured and polished every day or moved an inch to the left so they’d stand up on the bookshelf just so.

A year later, Jisung came along. Jisung, with his charming gangly flip-flopping feet and eyes that always seemed to smile even when the rest of his face refused to. Jisung, with the squishy cheeks and tongue that stuck out from the corner of his mouth when he concentrated. Jisung, the boy who Chenle had whispered his singing dreams he’d never dared tell anyone before to and received a smile in return.

“You can sing, and I’ll dance,” Jisung said one day, lying on the carpet of his living room while Chenle flipped through television channels with the remote. “And we’ll both be rich.”

It didn’t seem too much to ask back then, not if they wanted it.

But eventually, the odds of Chenle singing and Jisung dancing dropped to negative numbers. It started slowly, at first. Hospitals filling to maximum capacity, fog becoming more carbon monoxide than vapour. Then the snow came, dashes of acid crystals so caustic and corrosive they reacted with the metal and dripped into the plumbing system. 

Next were the Hunters, who guided them out of their own homes to testing labs scattered throughout the urban cities, promising to rebuild the earth better than before but only tearing it down faster.

Chenle remembers the day they came for him, too. Not vividly in any sense, but clear enough despite shock numbing the details. Even when he thinks about it years later, it’s like he’s watching it through the thick bottom of a wine glass, distorted and watery and warped to the point that it’s barely recognizable.

Math class, last period of the day. He and Jisung were filling in their worksheets, doing some kind of foot wrestling battle underneath the desks just to distract themselves from the boredom when the door swung open and the handle flew off from the force.

If he thinks hard enough, he can still feel the sharp nails digging into his back to push him down the stairs and out of the building.

Jisung was always the more adaptable of the two, finding a gap in the slow-moving crowd wide enough for them to slip through unnoticed and run towards the other exit. They spent two weeks camped out in what used to be the canteen, ransacking as much unexpired food as they could and stuffing the rest into their cheap tattered school bags.

So off they went, first walking past their housing complex only to see the roof sinking in, and then- just walking. Walking as far as they could, following the river behind the school with their stiff school shoes poking their feet and only their gym uniforms for a spare change of clothes.

Chenle and Jisung have been tripping over their own frostbitten feet for almost three years, still stuck with clothes they’ve long since outgrown and tangled knots of hair regularly hacked off with a pair of craft scissors. They’re the only ones left in the city besides the Hunters, the only ones who’ve managed to evade them for this long.

Ever since they almost walked right into a testing lab, Chenle didn’t think it could get any worse. But now Jisung is coughing blood into the snow and his complexion is a sickly pale shade of grey, hair matted against his forehead with sweat even as his teeth chatter.

Chenle knows it’s only a matter of days, maybe even hours until he’s the only one left. Until he’ll have to bury his best friend’s dead body in the snow and leave it to rot because cremating him would only bring the Hunters straight to their camp.

“Come on,” he whispers, rubbing his numb hands together as he spoon-feeds Jisung from a can of preserved baby food. “Stay with me, Jisung.”

Jisung obediently swallows, lifting a shaking arm to swipe away the extra food dribbling from his lips. “Cold,” he coughs out, another spatter of blood landing on Chenle’s cheek. “I’m so c-cold.”

“I know,” Chenle replies, furiously rubbing away the tears welling up in his eyes. “I know, only a little longer.” He keeps feeding Jisung, one spoonful at a time, as the red sun drops lower in the sky and the inky splashes of darkness fill the sky. The smog is too thick to see the stars - if there are any.

Chenle can’t remember ever being able to see the stars in the sky, come to think of it. It’s always just been smoke and exhaust puffing up in big bursts further and further until it ripped a continent-sized hole in the only layer protecting them from the apocalypse.

Once upon a time, he had comforted himself by thinking that even though the end of the world was here, he had his family, at least. He had his grandmother sitting in front of the TV watching her old Cantonese films, his older brother doing chemistry homework at the kitchen table, his parents chopping scallions and ladling out soup for dinner.

Then all of a sudden it was him and Jisung against the world. Until the world disappeared bit by bit too, and now- it’s just them.

“Chenle,” Jisung grabs onto his jacket sleeve with weak fingers, “Chenle, remember when-” a cough interrupts his sentence, but he continues on with a rasp in his throat, “Remember when we played Dance Dance Revolution at your cousin’s house and you were so excited you knocked over the bowl of popcorn and a can of Coke?”

Chenle nods, pressing his lips together and smoothing the hair off Jisung’s temples. “It was a really good song. I used to hear it on the radio all the time. And it was an accident, the popcorn was right next to the machine.” The syllables are foreign on his tongue, words that were once so commonplace but he hasn’t said out loud in years. “Also, I was a terrible dancer. Just wanted to put that out there in case you thought I had any illusions that I was good.”

The other boy smiles, revealing his gums as he says, “You weren’t that bad. Just easily distracted.”

“Still am, you know,” Chenle reminds him. “But it’s harder when there’s nothing to distract me, especially not other people.”

Jisung hums in agreement, going silent when Chenle leans forward to wipe the sweat from his forehead. “Remember when I got my hand stuck in the vending machine?”

“Idiot,” he scoffs to hide the sob building up in his throat. “Why are you bringing this up now?”

“Thought it would make you laugh,” Jisung shrugs. “I miss your laugh, that’s all.”

“My laugh is too loud,” Chenle points out. “If I laughed it would just bring them straight to us. It’s worse than a smoke trail.”

“...can we get back to the vending machine?”

“What about it?” He asks, leaning back on his knees.

Jisung closes his eyes for a second, face so starkly bloodless that the edges blend in with the smokey gray-tinged snow. “Your favourite snacks were Frito Hoops because you could eat them off your fingers while playing video games. Least favourite was Twizzlers. I got my hand stuck when I tried to smuggle you an extra-large bag of the barbecue-flavoured hoops.”

“At the basketball tournament,” Chenle fills in the rest, grinning at the memory. “One of the parents had to call a janitor to come and tug your hand out, and then I felt really bad so we walked ten minutes away to go get doughnuts.”

Jisung inhales sharply and tightens his hands into fists when another wheezing fit wracks his body. Through the coughs, he manages to force out a few words, “Hurt like a bitch, but the doughnuts were good.”

Chenle peels off his jacket and lays it carefully over Jisung. “Let’s think of more. How about the time you learned to skateboard from that one stoner kid you met at the convenience store, and everyone kept telling you he was sketchy but you didn’t listen?”

“He was good at skateboarding,” Jisung picks up the jacket corner to run it along his blood-stained lips. “I think he got arrested a few months later, though. Something about stashing weed in his locker?”

“Park Jisung,” he prods at the other boy’s arm. “Did you take any of the weed he offered you? Don’t lie.”

“What? No!” He frowns at Chenle. “I was eleven, Chenle. I barely knew what vaping was.”

Chenle snickers, “Remember when Mark swiped a Juul pod from his brother to see what it was like and dropped it in the bushes while he was choking?”

Jisung covers his mouth with a frail hand to mask the laughter, but his shaking shoulders betray it all. “That was the funniest day of my life. You would think he just ran a marathon by how red his face was. He didn’t even pick a good flavour, I think it was Tutti Frutti or something.”

“Vaping is dumb anyway,” Chenle sighs. “It makes you look like a douche and it’s really bad for your lungs, too. I mean, I’m not sure how much worse it could be than air at this point,” he gestures at the blanket of pollution in the sky, “But whatever.”

Jisung giggles as his teeth chatter, “How have we not died yet?”

“Hey, Park Jisung,” Chenle slaps him lightly. “You’re one to talk when we’ve _almost_ died plenty of times and-" he pauses, and when his voice comes out, it's thin and choked up. "It seems like they don't want to give you any more ‘almosts.’”

“Sorry,” he rasps. “Dark humour is a bad idea, got it.” There’s only a short silence before he speaks again, the words spewing out of his mouth like he’s scared of not getting them out fast enough. “Remember when we were first hiding in the school canteen, we walked up to the roof and just screamed every curse word we knew?” A small smile accompanies his words when he comments, “That was fun. You knew a lot of swear words.”

“I learnt them from my brother,” Chenle replies. “He used to swear all the time when he watched sports on TV.”

“Makes sense.”

Chenle peers up at the sky. “It’s getting dark, we should try and get some sleep.”

Five minutes later when he’s curled up in a fraying sleeping bag held together by a couple of strings, he hears Jisung ask faintly, “Chenle?”

“Yes?”

“Promise that when I’m gone, you won’t let them take you. Stay alive, for both of us.” Jisung’s voice is resolute and serious.

Chenle is about to nod when the gravity of the situation sucker-punches him in the stomach. He’ll be all alone. No other voices to fill his head, no one else to carry the supplies, no one to help scout the area for Hunters - no real reason to even hide from them anymore. It’s with reluctance that he answers quietly, “I’ll try.”

In the darkness, he hears Jisung shift to face him and whisper, “You wanted to be a singer back then. I was going to dance with you.”

Chenle almost wants to cry thinking about it now, but he settles instead for locking eyes with Jisung. “Too bad that isn’t happening, right?” His voice cracks on the last word and it’s as if a dam breaks inside him, water that’s been building pressure for years finally cascading in tears down his cheeks.

Jisung lays a heavy arm over him and Chenle leans into the crook of his shoulder, letting the hot salty tears soak his best friend’s shirt. It’s an odd feeling, knowing that this is one of the last moments he’ll have with the last person left alive. “I’m so sorry,” he murmurs while biting back a sob, not even sure what he’s apologizing for.

Jisung rubs calming circles on Chenle’s back with his free hand, “Don’t be. You need sleep, okay? I’ll be here.”

❅

The next morning Chenle wakes up embracing a lifeless body. Jisung’s chest is completely still, glassy-eyed stare facing the sky and nothing but stars that aren’t there reflected in his eyes.

It only takes a moment for reality to slam Chenle in the face and shatter him into a thousand irreparable shards, for him to curl over the dead body and sob uncontrollably as if just the act of living rips him apart.

He knows this is something he should have prepared for, he couldn’t expect anything else to see this morning. But he knows all too well that playing it as a mind-movie over in his mind and having his eyes play it for him are two completely different things, despite them coming together to plunge a dagger into the center of his already-bruised heart.

His bony limbs shake, fragility hiding behind a veneer of sharp angles and boldness. His cries are heavy and agonized, face twisted in pain, lips forming Jisung’s name and repeating it over and over again like a mantra.

Chenle barely registers the sounds of boots stepping in and out of the snow nearby, slumped like a rag-doll over a corpse. He feels empty, spaced out and vacant as if all the energy drained out of him with the first breakdown.

And when a Hunter walks up behind him and lifts him up roughly by the arms, he can’t muster up the energy to fight even as his last promise to Jisung echoes in his ears.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Kudos, comments, and bookmarks are all greatly appreciated and they really do make my day, even if it's just a simple "<3," I cherish them immensely :)


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